


you're the rock to my roll

by honey_butter



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Dancing, Drums, F/M, Fluff, figayda is also in here briefly, just teens being teens, my work for gorguguary!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29109141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_butter/pseuds/honey_butter
Summary: Zelda’s brandishing his drumsticks at his face, holding them more correctly than he had at first but still slightly wonky, reaching up and playing a little rhythm on his forehead.“Ow,” Gorgug says, even though it doesn’t hurt, like, at all, comparatively. He’s a little bit stunned, and a lot in awe, and it’s all making his brain turn to goop.“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Zelda drops her hands and her smile wavers and she looks like she’s going to put the sticks back but he grabs her hands before she can.“Do you want to learn how to play? A little?”
Relationships: Zelda Donovan/Gorgug Thistlespring
Comments: 16
Kudos: 63





	you're the rock to my roll

**Author's Note:**

> as some of you probably know, i love gorgug with my whole heart and i had to do something for gorguguary!! this was originally going to be a lot longer but i'm pretty sick rn so,,, yeah this is it. the drummer in me really popped out with this one so akhddfhkdsdj apparently i'm missing teaching kids how to play. hope you guys enjoy!!

Gorgug nearly falls off his drum stool when Zelda grabs his hand. He’d been spinning around idly, rolling his drumsticks between his fingers, as Fig droned on and on about her idea for a concept album  _ (okay, imagine it’s a nuclear apocalypse and the squirrels are taking over the government so the frogs fight back).  _ Zelda is set up at his feet, leaning back against the wall behind him and chewing absentmindedly on a styrofoam cup that used to be filled with Monster. She’s just… so cute, like always, and Gorgug’s been trying to distract himself from her so he can at least pretend he’s listening, because otherwise he would have full Zelda tunnel vision and Fig would kick her out of the band meeting.

She’s still munching softly as she takes his hand, startling him from the drumstick focus to the woah, Zelda Donovan’s skin is  _ so soft _ wavelength that controls his brain approximately eighty percent of the time. Her thumb skims over the back of his hand: back and forth and back and forth, rubbing and tracing across his scars. Her thumb is scarred too, and calloused, but soft and velvety in a way he’s only ever known Zelda to be. She’s watching Ayda watch Fig—Ayda’s eyes wide with adoration, Zelda’s soft—and Gorgug has to swallow past a lump in his throat.

He tugs on her hand, and she looks over at him, still soft eyed, and he whispers, “Hey,” down to her. Quiet. Just for her.

She swallows around the cup and puts it down by her hoof, leaning over and knocking her horn into his hip, “Hi.”

Gorgug pockets his drumsticks and brings his free hand down to brush the hair from her eyes, tucking the longer pieces of her fringe behind her ear and smoothing the shorter bangs out.

“You’ve got stupid long arms,” Zelda mumbles.

“You’re really pretty,” he whispers, down to her, because she is and she deserves to hear it.

She blushes, even more than she had when he touched her hair, “Shut up.”

“You are.” Gorgug has always been earnest, he knows that, but he’s never felt earnesty like this—the kind that burns his heart and thrums like a gentle rage through his veins. He wants Zelda to know just how beautiful she is, just how much he means it. He wants to card his hands through her hair and press kisses to her head and feel the skin of her back and rub circles in her thighs. He wants to cuddle in his bed and study on hers and nap at the drive-in theater in the Hangvan and hold her hand while she sits on the floor and he sits at his drum set. Because Zelda Donovan is pretty and smart and kind and insanely fucking cool and awesome and amazing and he could exhaust his entire vocabulary trying to describe her.

“I’m getting the feeling no one is paying attention to me,” Fig grumbles, loudly, glaring pointedly at Gorgug.

“I will always pay attention to you, Fig,” Ayda says, immediately and severely, just like she always is.

Fig melts a little bit, “Babe, that’s so sweet. But I wasn’t talking about you.”

“Sorry?” Gorgug says, but he isn’t really. She’d lost him at radioactive squirrels, and like, okay, most of their fanbase are tweens, but this is a stretch, even for middle schoolers.

Fig sighs and ping pongs between looking at Gorgug and Zelda, before landing and staying on Ayda. A certain look comes over her that Gorgug recognizes but wishes he didn’t: a mix of gooey and focused and plotting. A look that he’s only ever seen her direct at Ayda, and one that usually leads to him sitting on their tour bus alone and a little embarrassed. “You know what, I’m not about to get in the middle of young love or whatever, so maybe we should just be done for today.”

“Sorry, I can, uh, go. Haha, it’s fine, I’m just in the way,” Zelda says, trying to pull away but failing as Gorgug tugs her hand back and she refuses to put in the effort to contest it.

“No, no,” Fig says, already slinging her bass over her back instead of her front and reaching over to grab Ayda bodily from behind her keyboard. “Don’t worry, Zelda. Really, it’s no issue, I’ve gotta… do a thing anyway. Yeah. A thing.”

She’s dimension door-ing pretty soon after that, Ayda already squawking out a slightly scandalized,  _ extremely  _ mushy, “Fig!”

And then it’s just Gorgug and Zelda sitting in the Thistlespring Tree’s practice room.

“What just happened?” Zelda asks, giggling nervously a little bit and blushing a ton still.

“Er.” Gorgug says in the way that only someone who has third wheeled a tour with Fig and Ayda can hope to communicate.

“I like your friends,” Zelda says, head tilting to the side and inspecting Gorgug’s hand or something thereabouts. “They’re so, like, not to call them weird, but—”

“Oh, we’re definitely weird.”

“No, but like. Random. Like Fig especially, but I know Riz is considered your like plan guy, or whatever, but even he’s like  _ ah _ what’s goin’ on with that guy, ya know?” Zelda leans forward and nips at Gorgug’s hoodie cuff, cutting a loose string off with her teeth and chewing it thoughtfully. “I mean, I guess we’re, I mean the Seven Maidens, are like that too. I just, I think Sam keeps us on track most of the time haha. Not as much, now that she’s distracted by Aelwyn but, like, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gorgug says, nodding fervently, and he knows he must look like an utter lovesick wreck even though she’s just talking about their adventuring parties, but it’s just… it’s  _ Zelda. _ How’s he supposed to  _ not _ look like a lovesick wreck?

“Sorry, we can, I mean, I can go now? If you want me to? Or, or I can stay, if you want to do something maybe? Like. I don’t care. But.”

“I’d love to do something with you. If you want to stay.”

“Oh. Sweet! Um. Anything in mind, or…?”

“No, uh.” He hadn’t gotten that far, his brain had sort of grabbed hold of the ‘don’t let Zelda leave yet’ and held onto it.

“Well. Maybe you could. Come down here? Maybe. I just. Yeah.” Zelda finishes her disjointed request by pulling his hand around and pressing a small kiss to the bottom of his palm.

Gorgug sucks on his tusk thoughtfully, although he isn’t quite sure what he’s thinking about, “Sure. Yeah. Sure.”

He clambers off of his drum stool—less awkward than he was even a month ago, he’s been getting better about knowing where all of his limbs are, what with Bloodrush and the newfound confidence that the Nightmare King’s Forest had forced upon him—and settles himself beside Zelda, their backs against the wall.

“Now you aren’t so far away,” Zelda says, dropping his hand to push herself up and plant a kiss on his cheek.

“Normally I’m over a foot taller than you,” Gorgug points out, blushing and staring deep into the head of his bass drum, like it holds all of the secrets to his overactive heart.

Zelda hums in assent, and then they sit in silence for a little bit. It’s easier, usually, for them to do this when they’re listening to loud, screaming music. Gorgug guesses that says something about each of them, how they feel more comfortable filling their quiet with other people’s noise, but he likes his music and thinks that Zelda has really great taste and he still doesn’t have awesome wisdom so he decides not to investigate it too closely. Lately, though, they’ve been getting better just sitting together, without anything to listen to or hide behind. It’s still incredible, obviously, when Zelda leans over and puts an earbud in his ear, when the music creates a little bubble of noise around the two of them, but Gorgug is getting more and more used to the sounds of shared silence, of comfort without any pressure to try and be someone he’s not.

He feels small hands worm their way into his hoodie pocket, and he’s just about to reach down and ask if she’s cold when she pulls back, a little chaotic smile on her face that’s so similar to the ones she gets in a rage that he has to blink. Zelda’s brandishing his drumsticks at his face, holding them more correctly than he had at first but still slightly wonky, reaching up and playing a little rhythm on his forehead.

“Ow,” Gorgug says, even though it doesn’t hurt, like, at all, comparatively. He’s a little bit stunned, and a lot in awe, and it’s all making his brain turn to goop.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Zelda drops her hands and her smile wavers and she looks like she’s going to put the sticks back but he grabs her hands before she can.

“Do you want to learn how to play? A little?” 

“Can I?”

“Yeah, just, not on my head.” He smiles at her, that one Gorgug Smile that he’s never seen himself do but is all thin-lipped and wide and sweet. “Hold on, give me a minute.”

He turns away from her and pulls out his tinkerer’s tools, fiddling around with his drum stool for a few minutes while Zelda distracts herself with his drumsticks. It takes a little bit, and a few trips to his parents’ workroom to find materials, but he eventually makes a foldable addition to his stool that he can activate with a little button on its underside.

“There,” he says, proud of himself but trying to downplay it.

“Oh my God, Gorgug, you’re literally… woah, I, um, wow, you’re… you’re, um. Hm.” Zelda springs up, kissing him quickly on the mouth with her hands still wrapped around the drumsticks. “Yep. Okay. Um. We’ll get back to that later but.”

Gorgug laughs, happily, and sits down on the new addition to the drum stool—he’d expanded it back and to the sides so that there would be space for him  _ and _ Zelda to sit, and so that he can guide her while she plays. She sits down in front of him, between his legs, and honestly she’s still so much smaller that he has to lean his neck down to rest his chin on the top of her head.

“Okay, you ready?” He asks, grabbing one of her hands where she’s still holding the drumsticks tightly.

Zelda nods, excitedly, and he can’t see her face but he knows she’s smiling.

“So. Uh. First, you gotta hold them like this,” he takes her fingers in his hand and unwraps them, trying to place them back around the stick in a more-correct way. “You want a little gap here, between your thumb and forefinger. That’s where the control comes from. And don’t squeeze too tight. Yeah, like that. You don’t want to hurt your hand if you play for too long, and you want to let it bounce.”

Zelda corrects her grip on the other stick herself, hopping a little bit like she does when she’s focusing and can’t chew on something. “Okay, how do I hit it?”

“Here, you just…” He brings both of her hands in front of the drum in a loose triangle, tapping her wrists and forearms. “Don’t, like, force it, okay? Your wrist movements are the most important part.”

Zelda goes slow at first, lifting each part of her arm precisely before making the drumstick fall. He lets her hit the snare for a while, until she has a better feel for it and is moving slightly more fluidly—still static and unsure, but he remembers how long it took him to understand how to play smoothly. Then, he transitions her right hand to the hi-hat and puts her hooves on his over the pedals so she can feel how he holds the hat down and pushes with the front of his foot at the kick drum’s pedal.

About fifteen minutes later, they’ve got a decent, rudimentary rock beat going. It’s still clumsy and a little disjointed, but thumping and driving like any good rock pattern should be. This is the kind of beat Gorgug falls back on time and time again. When you take out all the flashy fills and cymbal patterns he’s picked up during his career, it’s the same one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and, the same and-three and-one and- and- and-. 

Zelda’s getting into it. Her head is bobbing in time with the music, and it’s making her hair go all frizzy around her head. Gorgug’s smiling so hard it’s making his cheeks hurt. The feeling of her against him is so nice, warm up his whole front with even her hooves covering his feet. He isn’t holding her hands anymore, so he fishes out some extra sticks from a bag next to him and starts to add in cymbal crashes.

This is why he loves playing drums now: the music that he can make with just one body, or, well, in this case, two. Drums move him, drive him in a way Gorgug hasn’t felt with anything else before, lighting up his veins and settling in his chest and… oh, like Zelda.

Zelda is quiet, most of the time. Shy. Always apologizing. But she’s fierce and funny and behind every single beat of his heart. She makes him want to be better, always, even though he knows she thinks he’s everything and more. She makes him want to soar, she makes him want to  _ dance. _

Zelda fumbles, slightly, and stiffens up, dropping one of the sticks in the process. It’s fine, they could have recovered, but she’s all tense now and he can tell she’s a second away from an apology wave so he stops playing and pulls her into his chest, wrapping his arms around her front and curling himself around her.

“Hey,” he whispers into the top of her head.

“Er. I’m—”

“You’re amazing, Zelda. You’re perfect.”

She giggles, nervously, “Well—”

“I mean it. You’re a natural. I gotta watch out for my spot in the band.”

Her giggles grow and she sinks back against him, “Okay, then.”

“Hey, uh, wanna dance?” He asks, pulling her closer against him before letting go.

“What?”

“We’ve got, um, good acoustics in here? I just thought maybe… it might be fun…”

“Yeah! Yes, that sounds, yeah. Do you want—?”

“Yeah, you can get the music.”

She stands up from the stool, reaching for her crystal and pulling her earbuds out of the jack, “Are The Genasties okay?”

“Perfect.”

Music blares from her crystal—he doesn’t want to take the time setting up a speaker—and she glances over at him a little anxiously again.

Gorgug just smiles and pushes himself off of the drum stool, grabbing her by the hand and tugging her into the empty space in the center of the room. He starts bouncing, still holding her hand, and she smiles at him and starts hopping too.

Zelda’s a beautiful dancer, even when she isn’t in battle. As she gets comfortable, she lets go of the inhibitions that usually govern her every movement, her every thought so closely. She’s light on her hooves, hopping back and forth in complex steps and spinning herself under his arm and Gorgug lets himself get swept up into it.

He knew what he was doing when he suggested dancing. Drumming is his thing, as much a part of him as his rages and his tinkering and his flower. Dancing is Zelda’s, like her rages and her art and her music.

Gorgug, for all the comfort and confidence he’s been coming into, is lanky and a little uncoordinated when it comes to things like this. He isn’t great at letting himself go, letting every emotion be seen through his movements when he’s fully conscious of them. Zelda is only good at it when she’s dancing, and Gorgug loves watching her throw herself into the steps, into the feeling of it.

Zelda pulls him around her, twirling and twisting under his arms. She’s gorgeous. She’s deadly. Gorgug wants to kiss her.

He does, when there’s a lull in the dance where he can pull her up close to him and dip her back in the way she deserves. Zelda’s giggling and grinning as they kiss, and it’s mostly tusks and teeth bumping into each other through their smiles, but it’s still perfect and  _ theirs. _

Gorgug goes to pull back, to continue dancing, but Zelda hooks her fingers around the friendship bracelets she made him—knots of thread forming the trans and bi pride flags that she also wears on her own wrist, and another, purple one that she’d designed with their initials—and she reels him back in, pressing a more exact kiss to his mouth.

“You’re, um, you’re really awesome, Gorgug,” Zelda murmurs against his lips, kissing him again and again and Gorgug thinks he’s melting, thinks he’s falling to pieces under her hands.

_ “Zelda,” _ is all he can say back, her name soft and full of all his love, just like it should be, just like she deserves.

Through Zelda’s tinny speaker, the Genasties keep screaming about the ache of young love, and, yeah, it does ache, does hurt so deep in Gorgug’s chest that he isn’t sure if he’ll ever recover, but as he kisses Zelda in the middle of their impromptu dance floor he knows that this pain, this overwhelming mix of love and longing and devotion, is something he never wants to go away.

Gorgug Thistlespring loves Zelda Donovan, he  _ loves _ her, and he’ll have a million more chances to show her just how much, just how deep that love goes. But right now there’s drumming and there’s dancing and there’s Zelda, smiling at him before she kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!! the genasties are an all genasi punk band that i've had floating around in my brain for a while now and i had to include them lol. also, like i said, i am sick so i apologize for any errors: this was lightly edited and i'm havin a time trying to post it.
> 
> as always, don't be shy to leave a comment!! i'm on tumblr at [labelleofbelfastcity](https://labelleofbelfastcity.tumblr.com/) if you want to come talk about gorgug (i am always open to talking about any fh characters, but specifically gorgug). i hope you guys have an excellent day/night!!


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